Bureaucrats and the Korean export miracle

What makes an industrial policy successful? This thesis finds that the effect of an industrial policy changes tremendously with the implementing bureaucrat. I study South Korean bureaucrats who promote exports on appointments to 87 countries between 1965, when South Korea was one of the world’s poorest countries, and 2001. I exploit the three-yearly rotation of bureaucrats between countries to show that individual bureaucrats matter greatly in boosting exports. Increasing bureaucrat ability by one standard deviation is associated with a 37% increase in exports. This effect is comparable to that of opening an office, implying that this industrial policy has no effect when implemented by a bureaucrat one standard deviation below average. I exploit differential import demand growth to study a mechanism via which better bureaucrats increase exports: transmitting information about market conditions. Under better bureaucrats South Korean exports increase more with a product’s import demand. Finally, I investigate whether experience can bridge the gaps between bureaucrats. I isolate quasi-random variation in experience, exploiting a product’s import demand growth during the bureaucrat’s first appointment. In subsequent appointments of this bureaucrat exports increase in products with greater bureaucrat experience. This highlights that organizational capacity grows endogenously, implying a novel channel for path dependence in organizational capacity

Mass vaccination and educational attainment: evidence from the 1967–68 Measles Eradication Campaign

We show that the first nationwide mass vaccination campaign against measles increased educational attainment in the United States. Our empirical strategy exploits variation in exposure to the childhood disease across states right before the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967–68, which reduced reported measles incidence by 90 percent within two years. Our results suggest that mass vaccination against measles increased the years of education on average by about 0.1 years in the affected cohorts. We also find tentative evidence that the college graduation rate of men increased